Christian Roman Empire
The transition to the '''Christian Roman Empire' lasted from about 305 AD until 363 AD. It began with the abdicated of Emperor Diocletian, which ushered in the unstable Second Tetrarchy. It then ended with the last Emperor of the dynasty founded by Constantine the Great, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. Despite the familiar story the persecution of Christians by the Roman, the Empire was in most ways the cradle of Christianity that allowed it to thrive. Its governing principle was that all cults were tolerated unless they awoke unrest or disobedience to the Roman authorities. Furthermore from the 2nd-century AD, traditional polytheism was waning, and Romans everywhere were searched for the answer to the meaning of life in eastern cults. The two glorious centuries following the life of Jesus Christ was a great age of growth and acceptance for Christianity throughout the Empire; by 300 AD, Christians may have made up about a tenth of the population of all classes. There were of course periods hostility from the Roman authorities, notably Diocletian's Great Persecution around 303 AD, but ultimately Christianity received just enough persecution to fortify its spirit, rather than to break it. Emperor Diocletian instituted the Tetrarchy believing he had put the Roman Empire back on the path to stable government. But without Diocletian himself, the four co-emperors soon became rivals rather than colleagues. From the chaos of its collapse, emerged Constantine the Great. There is little unusual in Roman history for an Emperor to credit his military victorier to a particular god; Emperor Aurelian had credited the sun-god Sol Invictus for the successes of his reign. But Constantine's mysterious decision to credit victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge to the Christian God, can be seen now with hindsight as one of the major turning points in the history of the Church and the world. His reign began the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of the Empire. All subsequent Emperors were Christians who openly favoured the Church, with the one exception of Julian the Apostate. And the people slowly began to fall in-line, converting to Christianity in great numbers. It was eventually to be the official state religion with the Edict of Thessalonica of 380 AD, after which the pagans were persecuted with the same religious zeal under which Christians had once themselves suffered. The other momentous event of Constantine's reign was of course the establishment of a new imperial capital; Constantinople would be the greatest city anywhere in Europe for almost 900 years. But the strong reigns of the Illyrian Emperors and then Constantine proved merely a pause in what can been seen as three-century-long period of decline for the Empire. When the troubled Constantinian Dynasty ended in 363 AD, the Roman Empire entered a critical stage that would end with the fall of the Western Empire. History Christianity (1st-3rd century) During era of the apostles, the centre of the Christian world had naturally been Jerusalem, since it was still basically a Jewish sect. But over the subsequent two centuries, Christianity began to separate itself permanently from Judaism, and establish itself throughout the Roman Empire. After the Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 AD) and Roman sack of the Jerusalem, many Christians fled Palestine throughout the Empire. By the reign of Emperor Nerva (96-98 AD), even the Roman authorities recognised Christianity as a separate faith, with Christians excluded from tax-exemptions enjoyed by Jews. While relations between the Romans and Jews were often turbulent, the Romans were nevertheless impressed with the sheer ancientness of Judaism, and more or less allowed them to conform to Roman rule in their own way; newfangled Christianity was owed no such deference. As a group inclined to secrecy for fear of persecution, the story of the early Christian Church is very hard to recover. Its success can only be judged by the Empire-wide institutionalised authority that the Church had in place by the end of the 3rd-century AD. In her early years, Christianity had mainly gained adherents from the downtrodden - slaves, women, the poor, and common soldiers - attracted by its promise that all were equal in the eyes of God, salvation after death and the fact that the Christian life could be lived in a purposeful and optimistic way. By 300 AD however, the Church had enjoyed an unprecedented period of growth and acceptance; slaves had been joined by their masters, women by their husbands, and soldiers by their officers. Christians may have made up about a tenth of the population of the Empire, concentrated in the towns; it long remained a predominantly urban phenomenon, with bishops emerging as overseers of urban Christian populations. The great achievement of the Fathers of the Church, such as Clement pf Rome (d. 99 AD), Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107 AD), Polycarp of Smyma (d. 156 AD), Origen of Alexandria (d. 254 AD), and Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258 AD), was to navigate both the opportunities and perils of emerging in a religious age; the huge opportunity of diffusion and expansion, and the peril of being reabsorbed into Judaism or contamination from other mystery cults. By the 3rd-century AD, the exclusiveness and isolation of early Christianity had waned, and Christians were increasingly prominent in local affairs. The Church was meanwhile beginning to raise funds in unprecedented sums, as wealthy patrons rendered unto God whatever they hadn't already rendered unto Caesar. The shift away from Jerusalem meant the Church became far less centralised, instead evolving a hierarchy of officers to regulate their affairs; archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons. Even in Britain, far removed from both the centre of Christian and imperial power, there were at least three bishops who attended the council at Arles in 314; London, York, and Lincoln. Naturally the archbishops of the largest cities came to exert greater authority still, especially Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. The archbishop of Rome, or the Pope, claimed a higher authority even than that, since his diocese was both the capital of the Empire, and had been founded by St. Peter himself; not that others necessarily agreed. At best, the archbishop of Rome was seen as the "first among equals". The response of the Roman authorities to the rise of Christianity was largely predictable; its governing principle was that new cults were tolerated unless they awoke unrest or disobedience to the state. So despite the traditional story of a persecuted faith, official hostility to Christianity was sporadic and localised; at least until the 3rd-century AD. The persecution of Christian in Rome under Nero of 64 AD was a rare exception. There were of course many individual martyrs as the result of local pagan populations putting pressure on the authorities to take action against the Christians in their midst. They were usually prosecuted for refusing to sacrifice to traditional Roman gods or the Emperor; Jews had a legal right to refuse, Christians did not. The Romans also disliked that Christianity was intolerant; all other religions of the Empire accepted that other gods existed, with the one exception of Judaism. There were two great outbreaks of mass persecutions. That of Emperor Decius around 249 AD was a response to the Crisis of the 3rd-Century, and the conclusion that the solution to all Rome’s problems could be a return to traditional Roman virtue and values. Christians like others were obliged to sacrifice to the traditional gods; to judge by the certificates issued to save them from persecution many did, but some did not and died. Nevertheless, Christians noted with some satisfaction that their persecutor did not prosper; the Goths slew Decius at the Battle of Abritus. But Diocletian did not appear to draw any conclusions from this, since in 303 AD he launched the Empire's largest, bloodiest, and last official persecution of Christians. His reasons are uncertain, but perhaps most troubling for Diocletian, who always emphasised stability, was just how structured the Church was; an interconnected network of archbishops, bishops, and priest, with an Empire-wide institutionalised authority that in the minds of many Christians was above the states. After 303 AD, Christians were again ordered to sacrifice on pain of death, while the books and buildings of the Church were also targetted. Yet the Great Persecution ultimately failed to check the rise of the Church; the suffering of the martyrs merely strengthened the resolve of their fellow Christians; the edict was observed in a very uneven fashion; and non-Christians were generally horrified at what the state was doing to a seemingly harmless cult, best known for caring for the poor and the sick. Afterwards, the rise of Constantine the Great would see the pendulum swing decisively in favour of the Christian Church. Demise of the Second Tetrarchy (305-324 AD) When Diocletian voluntarily give-up the throne in 305 AD, the Tetrarchy went through a major readjustment; the junior-emperors, Galerius and Constantius, were both elevated to the rank of co-Emperors (Augustus), and two new junior-emperors (Caesar) were appointed. He selected two eminently capable men who were outsiders to step-in as the new junior-emperors, Maximinus Daia and Valerius Severus; he seems to have been deliberately trying to break the Roman tradition of blood inheritance. These four men formed the Second Tetrarchy. This would be the one and only occasion that Diocletian’s arrangements for the peaceful transfer of power within the Tetrarchy worked as he intended. He would live long enough in retirement at his huge palace-fortress in Spalatum to see the Roman Empire once again plunged into the kind of civil war, he had strived so carefully to prevent. The Second Tetrarchy barely had time to adjust to its new leadership before it began to crumble, and the roots of its demise were the power plays of two young princes who felt themselves overlooked; Constantine the Great and Maxentius. Just twelve months after Diocletian's retirement, the Western Augustus Constantius died of a sudden illness in Britain. While Diocletian had deliberately avoided blood relatives in the Tetrarchy, the practice of a son succeeding his father still seemed natural to most Romans. On his deathbed, Constantius recommended his son Constantine to the army as his successor. Constantine had been groomed for high office: he'd been well-educated in Latin and Greek; spent a decade at the imperial court of Diocletian; and had ample military experience. He was a natural leader of men, well known to the legions of Britain having served alongside his father for a year. So the army spontaneously clamoured for his elevation to the Tetrarchy; at least according to Constantine, in all likelihood he orchestrated it himself once his father was out of the way. With great reluctance, the co-Emperors eventually acquiesced, elevating Severus to Augustus and naming Constantine the new junior Emperor of the West. But this compromise only stoked the bitter resentment of another young prince who had been cast aside; Maxentius, the son of Diocletian's former co-Augustus Maximian, who had also expected to succeed his father. With the help of his father's supporters, Maxentius led a revolt that soon seized control of Italy, and dared the Tetrarchy to do anything about it. Galerius, now clearly the senior Augustus, ordered Severus into Italy in early 307 AD to deal with the usurper, but he was captured and killed during the campaign. In the summer, Galerius himself marched to Italy with an even larger army, but again the Aurelian Walls of Rome proved unassailable in their first true test. With the Tetrarchy clearly tottering, Diocletian was called out of retirement to get the it working again. In a conference at Carnuntum in 308 AD, a newcomer Licinius was appointed Augustus of the West, and Maxentius was once again declared a usurper, illegally occupying Italy; not that Maxentius paid any attention. What little stability remained in the Second Tetrarchy was destroyed three-years later, when Galerius himself died of a prolonged illness in 311 AD. The Empire had descended once again into civil war between four men each controlling a portion of the territory: Constantine controlling Britain, Gaul and Spain; Licinius in Greece and the Balkans; Maximinus Daia in Asia Minor; and Maxentius illegally holding Italy. But Maxentius’ position in Italy was untenable in the long-term. Ostracised by the rest of the Empire, the home peninsula was soon racked by economic problems, food shortages, and crippling taxation. By 312 AD, Maxentius was a man barely tolerated by the population, and Constantine, who had remained aloof from the Italian conflict until now, decided to seize the opportunity. He crossed the Alps with his legions and marched on Rome, with no reason to believe that he would fare any better than Severus and Galerius. But the situation in Italy had changed. In northern Italy, Constantine was greeting as a liberator by rejoicing crowds. He then proceeded south towards the capital at a snail’s pace, waiting for his presence on the peninsula to have its desired effect. It soon did. With Rome on the verge of open revolt, Maxentius ordered his legions out of the gates in the impregnable Aurelian Walls to meet with Constantine in the field at the famous Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312 AD). According to the well known story, on the eve of battle, and as a result of what he believed to be a vision, Constantine ordered his soldiers to put on their shields a Christian monogram; the Chi-Rho, formed by the first two Greek letters of the word "Christ". Despite being outnumbered, in the battle Constantine’s veteran legions broke Maxentius' army, pushing them back to the Tiber, where most of them were slaughtered or drowned including Maxentius himself. Constantine then entered Rome, where he was met by jubilant crowds. Historians have spilled a great deal of ink spilled over the question of why Constantine adopted the Christian God, and whether he was sincerely a Christian or was he cynically exploiting the religion to his own advantage. There was certainly political advantage in favouring Christianity specifically. If Constantine was going to topple the Tetrarchy, then he need the support of an independent power-base oppose to the current regime. The Christians were the largest and fastest growing religious minority, popular among the common legions, and angry at the state in the wake of the Great Persecution. He would also specifically used Christianity as the pretext for the subsequent civil wars against his last two rivals. It is clear that Constantine considered the Christian God, in much the same way as Emperor Aurelian considered Sol Invictus; the Romans were deeply superstitious, and genuinely believed that gods played a role in how events on earth unfolded. The important thing was to get on the right side of the right god. After Maxentius’ defeat, in 313 AD Constantine forged an alliance with Licinius, intent on dividing the Roman world between them. During this meeting, the pair agreed on the so-called Edict of Milan, officially granting full religious tolerance to "Christianity and all" religions of the Empire. The document had particular benefits for Christians, restoring to them all their property seized during Diocletian's persecution. The Edict of Milan also provided the pretext for civil war against their rival in the east, Maximinus Daia, who was a zealous persecutor of Christians. Maximinus immediately recognised their intention, and crossed the Hellespont to invade European territory. In a series of battles in the east, culminating in the Battle of Tzirallum (313 AD), Licinius prevailed. With Licinius now master over the entire eastern half of the Empire and Constantine in control of the west, their uneasy alliance resembled nothing more than that of Octavian and Marc Anthony; both arrangements unexpectedly lasted over a decade, though fractures in the alliance occurred early and often. When a son was born to Licinius in 315 AD, Constantine saw a threat to his own long-term dynastic ambitions. He suddenly proposed resurrecting the Tetrarchy with new junior emperors. It was a transparent trap, but Licinius had little option but to walk into it, and they fought one another in a series of battles, at Cibalae (316 AD) and Mardia (317 AD), both of which Constantine won. Afterwards, the pair reached a new settlement, in which the Balkans and Greece were ceded to Constantine. This new peace lasted a full seven years, before hostilities erupted again in 324 AD. Constantine had for some time been trying to provoke Licinius, unfairly accusing him of reneging on the Edict of Milan; Constantine openly favoured Christianity in his territories, while Licinius simply tolerated all religions. In the end, Constantine simply repeatedly encroached on the eastern provinces while supposedly pursuing barbarian intruders, until Licinius finally snapped and ordered him out of the east. The speed of Constantine's response suggests that he'd been waiting for just such a pretext. He won another series of battles over the next 4 months, that culminated in the Battle of Chrysopolis (September 324 AD) which resulted in Licinius' final submission. In victory, Constantine made a great show of magnanimously allowing his rival to go into exile, but twelve months later quietly had him executed. Constantine the Great (324-337 AD) Constantine now stood atop the Roman Empire, alone and unchallenged. He came to power full of confidence, full of energy, and full of ideas. Above all, he fervently believed that he was the instrument of the Christian God. Although Christianity would not become the official state religion of the Empire until the Edict of Thessalonica (380 AD), he openly favoured the Church, turning his back on over a millennia of tradition. Constantine thus played a more important part in shaping its future than any other Christian layman, and was to be called the "thirteenth Apostle". He went on to make considerable gifts of property to the Church, favouring in particular that of Rome; he built the original St. Peter's Basilica. Besides providing important tax concessions to the clergy, he conferred an unlimited right to receive bequests on the Church. Although his official policy was tolerance for all religions, many pagans still found their religious practices curtailed. Constantine also saw himself as responsible for the well-being of the Church, his greatest act being the calling of the first Ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Constantine presided over it, with nearly 300 bishops being present from throughout the Empire. Its main task was to settle the response of the mainstream Church to a new heresy, Arianism; or at least it became a heresy since the Council decided against the Arians. This did not satisfy all the bishops and Arianism was to survive until the seventh-century AD. But that was less important than that Constantine had presided at this crucial juncture, proclaiming the Emperor’s special favour; the Church was clothed in the imperial purple. And the people of the Empire slowly began to fall in-line, converting to Christianity in great numbers; for many Romans victory on the battlefield like those of Constantine were proof enough that the Christian God was the one true god. His other decision only slightly less momentous in its effects was the foundation of a new imperial capital; Constantinople. Rome itself had ceased to be the political centre of the Empire a long time ago. After 260 AD, the Emperors had based themselves in more strategically located cities across the Empire, such as Milan, Trier in Gaul, Sirmium in the Balkans, Nicomedia in Anatolia, and Antioch in Syria. Constantine eventually settle on Byzantium, then a small port-city on the west bank of the Hellespont, in eastern Thrace. The city had many advantages: it was centrally located at the crossroads between east and west, as well as between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; was easily defensible on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water; it was situated on the sea with a fabulous natural harbour, to facilitate supply and trade; and had easy access to the Danube frontier which everyone understood to be the most volatile in the Empire. Constantine essentially built a brand new city from the ground-up between 324 and 330 AD. Needless to say, his new capital was to be a Christian capital, where sacrifice to the old gods was explicitly forbidden. It's officially name was Nova Roma ''(New Rome), and at first the name Constantinople was an informal nickname, but within a few years the unofficial name stuck; it would remain for over 1000 years until 1453. Thus the Roman Empire now had a new centre of gravity, as well as a new religion. Despite the failure of the Tetrarchy, in almost all other areas of' imperial administration', Constantine continued the policies of Diocletian, with just a few tweaks here and there. So most of what Diocletian put in place wound-up defining the remaining centuries of the Empire. For instance, Constantine completely bought into his idea of the Emperor as the divinely appointed ruler, embracing the pageantry Diocletian had built-up to elevate the Emperor above mortal men; though obviously he looked to the Christian God rather than Jupiter. Constantine further improved on Diocletian's currency reform by introducing a new coin called the Solidus, that was almost pure gold. The soundness of the Solidus would become legendary, and it would remain essentially unchanged in weight and purity for the next 700 years. The new gold coin further stabalised the economy, and paved the way to payments of tax in hard currency again. Unfortunately, Constantine focused only on the gold standard, ignoring the silver and copper coins, which had the result of exacerbating the divide between the rich and everyone else; the rich were now shielded from the ravages of inflation, while the poor were not. This would haunt the Empire in the century to come, until Emperor Anastasius (d. 518 AD) finally tackled the issue. Constantine also tried to reintroduced draconian morality laws similar to those of Augustus, this time appealing to Christian virtue rather than traditional Roman values. Like Augustus, he wound-up achieving very little, other than punishing a few unfortunate souls far in excess of their crimes; indeed he executed both his own wife and eldest son for their transgressions. In military affairs, Constantine pursued numerous campaigns against the Germanic tribes beyond the Danube and Rhine frontiers; the Romans were now finally consistently getting the upper-hand in their dealings with the northern menace. He was in the process of planning for an ill-advised campaign against Sassanid Persia in 337 AD, when he suddenly fell ill. Knowing death would soon come, he desperately tried to make it back to Constantinople but made it only as far as Nicomedia. On his deathbed, Constantine famously summoned the bishop of the city, and was formally baptized into the Christian faith. The honorific Constantine "''the Great" was not granted by Roman historians, but by Christians long after his death. Nevertheless he certainly could have easily claimed the title on just his military achievements alone. Constantine was a strong political leader, the greatest general of his age, and a visionary who transformed the Empire like few Emperors before him. His reign changed the course of history for Christianity and thus the world. The city he founded would be the greatest city in Europe for almost 900 years. But despite all this, his legacy remains tricky to assess. If the measure of an Emperor is whether his reign left the Roman Empire better than when he found it, then Constantine brought chaos and civil war to the fragile Empire on his rise to power. His inexplicable desire to renew conflict with the Sassanids would leave his successors tied to a wars in the east for decades. And he then left chaos in his wake, by not favouring any of his three sons, instead choosing to be succeeded by all of them. This bizarre decision has led more than a few historians to accuse him of being so egotistical that he simply didn’t care what happened to the Empire after his death. For all that, Constantine the Great was easily one of the most important figures in all of world history. Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans (337-353 AD) Constantine the Great was succeeded by all of his three sons, with the Empire divided among them: Constantius II assumed control of the eastern Empire, and Constantine II the west, while the youngest Constans was given nominal control of Italy and the middle, under elder brother's guardianship. The arrangement all but guaranteeing a return to the dark days of civil war. The three co-Emperors had grown up in the shadow of their great father, a man who had spent his early career ruthlessly pursuing absolute power by any means necessary; as it turned out, the apples did not fall far from the tree. The brothers started where they meant to go on. One of their first acts was to arrange for the slaughter of almost all their wider-family, thus removing any other rivals for the throne. In the east, Constantius II pursued the war with Sassanid Persia that their father had been planning. Now that Christianity was the ideological basis of the Roman Empire, the continual wars with Zoroastrian Persia became more intense; though Christians in Persia had long been tolerated, the danger that they might turn disloyal in the continual wars with Rome meant their persecution became logical. For thirteen long years, blood and treasure were poured into the sands of the Middle East, with neither side making any significant gains. Meanwhile in the west, the two brothers focused most of their energy on squabbling with one another. Things escalated when young Constans came of age, but Constantine, having grown accustomed to dominating his brother, would not relinquish the guardianship. In 340 AD, squabbling turned to open conflict, with Constantine marching into Italy at the head of his legions. During the campaign, he was caught in an ambush and killed. Constans thus took control of the entire western Empire. He began his reign in energetic fashion, proving an able civilian administrator of his provinces. Alas, he lacked any military experience at all, and made the fatal mistake of paying little attention to the army. When the general Magnentius went into open revolt in 350, Constans was soon abandoned completely by the legions; forced to flee for his life, he was soon tracked down and executed. As the only surviving son of Constantine, Constantius II determined to march west and deal with the usurper, after hastily extracted himself from war with the Sassanids. Constantius clashed with Magnentius at the Battle of Mursa Major (351 AD), one of the bloodiest battles ever fought between two Roman armies; Constantius lost perhaps 30,000 men and he was on the winning side. Magnentius survived the battle and fought on for another two years, but was eventually decisively defeated and killed in southern Gaul. Constantius II (353-361 AD) Constantius II was the sole rule of what was now a tottering Roman Empire. The sweetness of his victory turned sour almost immediately. The civil war against Magnentius had been a chaotic affair, with legions pulled from the frontiers with reckless abandon by both sides. Constantius soon realised just how weak and depleted the northern defences had become, and had to spend the early part of his reign on the Danube and Rhine frontiers, restoring stability against opportunistic Germanic tribes. With the risk of renewed war with the Sassanids and the ever present possibility of internal revolts, what Constantius needed was a trustworthy colleague. In 355 AD, he elevated his last surviving male relative to the rank of junior-emperor, his cousin Julian. Julian was a serious, scholarly, and introspective young man, with no military experience, but was immediately dispatched to take charge of the Rhine frontier. But to everyone’s surprise, he threw himself into military life wholeheartedly, campaigning successfully against the Alemanni and Franks despite his feeble resources. Julian's crushing victory at the Battle of Strasbourg (357 AD) cemented his reputation as a man to be reckoned with. In the east, the intensely insecure Constantius grew increasingly paranoid about his appartently formidable cousin. in 360 AD, he issued a sinister test of loyalty, ordering Julian to transferred some of his meager legions to the east. When Julian refused, yet another civil-war seemed inevitable. Both sides were preparing for war, when the shocking news spread around the Empire; Constantius II had suddenly fallen sick with a fever and died. Julian the Apostate (361-363 AD) Although the cousins had been on the verge of fighting each other to the death, Julian was still listed in Constantius’ will as his heir, and so he was now the rightful ruler of the entire Roman Empire. Julian would be an ironic end to the dynasty founded by Constantine the Great. Julian had been forced by Constantine's sons to spend his youth in exile, with no means of escape except for the books he had been allowed to accumulate. As a result, he was better educated and more cultured than any Emperor for more than a century; he idealised Greek philosophy and the Emperor of the 2nd-century AD, especially Marcus Aurelius. On gaining the purple, Julian set out on a system wide overhaul of the Empire, rejecting the administrative style of his immediate predecessors. Viewing the imperial court as inefficient, corrupt, and expensive, he summarily dismissed thousands of superfluous officials. He styled himself simply First Citizen as Augustus had, rather than the quasi-divine monarch of Diocletian. He attempted to reduce the size and power of the imperial bureaucracy, by devolving real political authority to city councils and local magnates around the provinces. But Julian's most famous reform, and the one that earned him the moniker Julian "the Apostate", was his attitude to religion. His own personal beliefs were complex and a matter of some dispute; a mix of paganism and philosophy; he was the last non-Christian Roman Emperor. Julian thus rejected the long held supremacy of the Christian Church, in favour of tolerance for all religions. In early 262 AD, he promulgated an edict proclaiming that all religions were now equal in the eyes of the Roman state, and no religious violence would be tolerated no matter who the perpetrator or who the victim. He restored pagan temples that had been confiscated since Constantine's time, stripped Christian bishops of numerous privileges, and attempted to build a third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; Solomon's Temple was destroyed in 586 BC and the Second Temple in 70 AD during the Great Jewish Revolt. The Christian Church was needless to say outraged, labelling Julian a persecutor of Christians. Fortunately for Christianity, Julian reigned for less than two years, and his controversial reforms went unfinished; they were soon reversed. He needed some impressive military victories to shore-up his legitimacy as Emperor, so renewed Constantius' war with Sassanid Persia. The campaign was at first a great success. Julian invaded Persia, made his way down the Euphrates, and defeated a Sassanid army outside the wall of Ctesiphon, one of the capitals. But Ctesiphon, like Roman cities, now boasted defensive wall that made it almost impregnable to siege. Unable to take the city before the Sassanid king arrived with main Persian army, Julian was forced to make an ignoble retreat back to Roman territory. During a disastrous retreat from the walls of Ctesiphon, Julian was killed by a spear in a minor skirmish with the Sassanids. Julian was a man of unusually complex character. Other Emperors who had attempted fundamental imperial reform like Augustus or Diocletian, had had the good fortune of a long reign. Julian on the other hand had dreamed big, but then died young. His policy of religious tolerance was soon reversed, and ultimately had little effect on slowing down the rapid establishment of the Christian Roman Empire. But had he lived, could Julian have seriously damaged the Christian Church, and changed the course of history? Some historians would argue that the Empire had been Christian for 40 years by now, and its momentum was too strong to be halted. The biggest threat to the Church in the 4th-century was not in fact paganism, but other Christians. Early Christianity was plagued by splinter sects and heresies, that were invariably suppressed by the mainstream Church with the help of the imperial authorities. Julian's policy of religious tolerance would have meant that all these repressed heresies would have been able to freely preach their own particular brand of the one true faith. It is not inconceivable that the Church could have slowly but surely torn itself apart. Julian's reign thus remains one of the most fascinating "what ifs" of late Roman history Category:Historical Periods